Thursday, March 23, 2017

There really have been precious few moments of political levity since the United States took the plunge and voted eccentric and xenophobic billionaire Donald Trump into the Oval Office. Since that second Tuesday in November, there has been a relentless blitzkrieg of rants and tweets and relentless showing off about the size of Trump's electoral victory, and I'm just talking about Trump himself. When you add to that his appointed cabinet picks, his baseless accusations (particularly about election fraud and Obama wiretapping him) and, of course, the relentless lying, it has been a pretty depressing thing to wake up to every day.

Yet, if there is a silver lining in all of this, it is probably in getting some laughs which, these days, seems to come more easily to people in the public eye.

Why?

Probably because holding up a mirror to the ridiculous behavior of the Trump administration has been akin to being in a political fun house of sorts, with all of the mirrors greatly exaggerating the images, except that in the case of Trump and his cronies, it is hardly much of an exaggeration.

With Trump having recently releases his proposed budget, he is going ahead and doing what he suggested he would do during the campaign. He is increasing the military budget significantly, while slashing just about everything else. That includes the arts, the EPA, science, education, and even Meals on Wheels. Of course, he is receiving plenty of criticism for all of this.

And recently, Neil deGrasse Tyson in particular took exception to the changes that would result from this proposed budget. Fittingly, he did so in a series of tweets, hopefully with language that the president will understand.

He did it using Trump's own big phrase of "Make America Great Again" against the president, suggesting that Trump's policies and actions thus far hardly qualify as doing anything to making it great. Quite the contrary, in fact.